


Survivals

by OldShrewsburyian



Series: Dangerous Ends [3]
Category: The Hour
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Dirty Limericks, Gen, Hospitals, Male Friendship, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 22:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9519098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Hector is an experienced but still-awkward hospital visitor. Freddie asks unanswerable questions.





	

Standing on the pavement in front of St. Mary’s, Hector regrets his decision to come. He reflects that he could whistle up a cab. He considers bolting into Paddington Station, and taking the Tube blamelessly home. Almost blamelessly. Hector sighs, and enters the hospital. By the time he approaches the ward sister’s desk, he has already straightened his shoulders and set his face. Automatic, too, is the lowering of his voice.

“Good evening. Hector Madden.” He had almost said ‘Captain.’ “For Frederick Lyon.” He has a sudden, incongruous picture of another hospital, another setting: what possessed those poor, proud parents to give their son that ridiculous name? When had he become, inevitably, Freddie? What had those parents made of his recklessness, of those piles of books that were treated like treasures and talismans?

“Here,” says the sister, and he signs his name in the appropriate box. “Sixth on the left.”

He knows better than to pause before entering, knowing how great an event is an unfamiliar footfall in such a place; but he slows a little, willing from his face all sorrow, all dread. He enters and finds the precaution superfluous: the man in the bed is asleep. He sets his hat down on the nightstand, sits down as quietly as possible. Marnie’s gladioli have begun to wilt, their stems to rot, but the scent of their decay is still preferable to the inevitable harshness of sweat and disinfectant. Hector takes a deep breath and tells himself that he has seen all this before, that there are greater tragedies, that this is not a defeat. But this is a different horror than those he knew in war. How stubborn, thinks Hector, the endurance of the body, how imperative its demands, that a man can lie with his scalp bound, his leg hung with weights, his lungs fed with air, and sleep. He thinks of the old man, once fleetingly glimpsed; so dependent on his son, so mercifully spared, it now seems, this vision.

Hector draws and expels a deep breath. Fathers and sons. Parents and their children. How closely wound and how complex those ties. He remembers the bottle-blond woman at Bel’s side in the canteen, how assertive, how oddly brittle… how profoundly different, it seemed, from her daughter; and yet such ties bound them too. A rattling sigh from the bed, and Hector reflexively clears his throat to announce himself, as if to forestall inadvertent revelations. He fingers the twine on the small package in his lap, feeling curiously like a trespasser in this space which is simultaneously impersonal and intimate. The swift official step of a ward-duty nurse turns out to belong to a freckled girl with an impudent nose and generous hips. Instinctively Hector half-rises.

“Just doing me rounds,” says the girl, her London vowels unsoftened by whatever training she had received here. Oxygen tank and morphine bag are evaluated, their respective numbers charted; the tension in the pulleys on the weights is tested. “Just checking your pulse, darling,” says the girl, as she takes Freddie’s wrist in one hand and her watch in the other. “There it is, and not so bad neither. Just relax, it’s only us.”  
Hector breathes a prayer that she will not draw Freddie’s attention to him, not now, not like this; and it is apparently answered, for the girl releases her patient’s wrist with something like tenderness, and makes the last of her notations.

“There now. Need anything else?” The response is given in a word so low or a gesture so small that it escapes Hector; but the nurse’s practiced eye would seem to be satisfied, as she departs without further demur, saying “I’ll leave you to it!” with a brightness that astonishes Hector by its lack of ironical inflection. Hector wonders when the last time was that he saw a man shiver like that, like a nervous hunter brought up to an unavoidable obstacle. He waits, and hears the other man’s breathing settle again. If he can camouflage his entrance, make the pretext that he has just arrived… he counts 5 minutes on his watch before he kicks the chair leg, jarring it against the linoleum. The next instant he curses himself for an idiot, hearing the other’s keening intake of breath.

“Sorry,” he says, keeping his voice as neutral and nearly-casual as he can. “It’s only me, Freddie.”

“Hector.”

“In person. I brought a few books—the new Bond and a couple of Christies. Bit odd, I know, but since you don’t eat chocolates…” Hector unties the twine and lays the paperbacks on the table’s lower shelf. “I thought of whisky, but the nurse would probably have my guts for garters.”

“Ha—ah, Christ, don’t make me laugh. Here—I can’t move in this contraption—shift round…”

Obediently Hector pulls his chair down to the foot of the bed. “Thanks for the books.”

“Don’t mention it. No one said… I didn’t realize you couldn’t…”

“They say I’ll get the sight of it back.” The attempt at lightness is not very successful. “And I’ve stopped seeing double with this one. Miracles of modern medicine, apparently.” Hector finds no response. “I’ll ask Bel to read them. Or the nurse.”

“The nurse?” Hector does his best not to sound incredulous.

“Nice little probationer. Comes round with the porridge. She’s a clergyman’s daughter.”

“And of course you’ve gotten her life story.”

“Naturally,” says Freddie with dignity. “I would expect no less of you, Mr. Madden.”

Hector smiles. “We did put together a damn fine show, Freddie.”

“Bel told me. I even—saw some of it.”

“Saw some of it?” He can make no attempt to disguise his incredulity, now. “You don’t mean to say that Cilenti’s thugs were watching television while…”

“I got them to turn—turn over the channel.”

“But, for God’s sake…”

“They needed it,” says Freddie, “to cover the sounds.”

“Oh.” Hector feels the blood drain from his face. “God, Freddie, that’s…”

“Pretty grim. Yes.”

“Yes.” Hector passes a hand over his mouth. “It was Cilenti, I suppose?”

Very slowly, Freddie’s mouth curls up in what Hector decides is a smile. “There’s that investigative instinct. You’ll make a first-class journalist yet.”

“Decent of you to say so.”

“Yes, it was Cilenti. He came in after the others had started. Trevor and—and—and…”

“Don’t worry about it. Trevor?”

“Boy from my street—Young Fascists—we had him on…”

“Got it.”

“Yes… they… brought me from the cinema.” He is silent for so long that Hector clears his throat, thinking to call him back from wherever he is wandering. “Sorry?” His voice is slurred with weariness, or something else. “Right. Cilenti…” Hector fights the urge to interrupt, to redirect, or to tell him to bury it, to leave it as far behind as possible, as quickly as possible.

“At first,” says Freddie, “he seemed angry. Or he pretended to be—no way to carry on a civilized conversation.” Hector watches him swallow. “They’d already lamed me. But it was still—I could still talk. It still seemed that talking might get him to, to give something away. And he did, in a way.” Patiently Hector takes down the businessman’s past as he presented it: his experience of violence and hypocrisy; his desire to revenge himself on a system which he could not imagine as other than wholly corrupt.

“Money,” says Freddie suddenly, out of one of his long silences. “That’s your angle. Or one of them. He thinks it’ll buy anything, simulate anything… or wants it to… The idea that money is not enough… that it won’t let him belong… I think that’s what made him… attack me. Or maybe the program was still on… I’m not sure… sorry…”

“Look, don’t apologize, Freddie. It was a bloody cheek of me to ask in the first place. I didn’t intend…”

Freddie opens his good eye. “Of course you did. Don’t talk rot.”

“I mean, I didn’t come here intending to… pump you.”

“Understood.”

Hector studies his fingernails morosely for a moment, closes and opens his fist. “Bastards, the lot of them.”

“Thanks. Helpful.”

There is another pause. “Look, should I go? I’ll let you…”

“No.” Hector freezes, hesitant to otherwise acknowledge the desperate urgency of the word. “If,” says Freddie, “if you’ve a train to catch, or…”

“No no. Anyway,” begins Hector, and clears his throat, “anyway… I don’t mind,” he finishes, unsure of his ground. There is a brief, tense silence. “I know quite a lot of filthy limericks.”

The other man’s laughter is fragile, but genuine. “Learned in the army, no doubt. Among other things.”

“Among other things.”

“How to… survive this, for instance.”

There is a too-long pause during which imagined futures and remembered pasts threaten to crush them. “No,” says Hector at last; “there are no guidelines. Only unspoken rules. Polite silences. Polite pretenses. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.” There is another pause.

“Forget it,” says Hector. “Forget it again and again, every day, every night—especially every night. Every hour, if you have to.” Feeling he has said too much and not enough, he adds, “You have already survived it.”

“On—what—terms?”

Hector stands up, shoving his hands into his pockets. “God, Freddie. Can you never leave a question unanswered? Even now?” Uneasily he paces the small room. “You must have been a terror as a boy.” There does not seem to be enough light, or enough air. “You’ll have to find the answer to that one. But you’re good at finding answers… and making terms, come to that.”

“Pax,” whispers Freddie.

Hector inhales sharply, attempts to shrug the tension out of his shoulders. “Pax.” He pauses, irresolute, before sitting down again. “Now. There once was a man from Madras, whose bollocks were made out of brass…”


End file.
